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Grzegorz

The Geysers represents a unique site for analysis of induced seismicity. This vapor-dominated geothermal field is located about 120 km north of San Francisco where the geothermal power production is performed for more than 50 years. Currently, The Geysers is the world’s largest geothermal field operated by Calpine and spanning an area of around 78km2 with the nominal capacity of 1517 MW. It is also an area of intensive induced seismic activity, with the largest event reaching magnitude 5.0. The seismicity is recorded with an extensive seismic monitoring networks operated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and broadband regional network.

The availaibility of high quality data triggered our interest in understanding seismo-mechanical processes in this reservoir. This resulted in a number of publications, that I decided to gather in one place – The Geysers resesarch page.

We published a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth related to the hydraulic fracture experiments performed in 2015 in Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory, Sweden. Here are the highlights:

Stephan Bentz published paper entitled “Sensitivity of Full Moment Tensors to Data Preprocessing and Inversion Parameters: A Case Study from the Salton Sea Geothermal Field”. The paper presents the results of investigation of mechanisms of approximately 80 small seismic events using two full seismic moment tensor inversion routines: the full waveform inversion and hybridMT code. The paper appeared in the Bulletin of Seismological Society of America.